give me your palm, i am written on it
by dolokhovian
Summary: "I saved the world once?" she says, like it's a question.


Dinner is over and Daphne has left. Sabrina is nowhere to be found.

Jake cleans up in the kitchen while Charming climbs the curving staircase slowly. It's a nice house he's built, he thinks. At least—it's a new house.

No one in the hall. In his room, the glass doors open to the sun hanging low over the trees, almost blue in the light. Her silhouette, and…

"I didn't know you smoked."

She does not turn around. "I'm immortal now, too."

"It's not that," says Charming, as he steps out onto the balcony. "I didn't know you felt like you needed to."

"I don't," says Sabrina. "Does anyone? I'm just…"

The prince leans against the balustrade beside her. "Tired?"

She laughs, tapping ash against the weatherbeaten wood. "No, no. I mean, a little bit. It's more—it's like—" And she breaks down for that brief moment, mask falling away with the wind. "I—"

Here she schools her expression back into unreadability. Not for the first time, Charming sees himself in her.

"What am I doing?" she asks. She moves the cigarette back to her lips. "Maybe I'm just homesick. I know, I know," she says, waving a hand toward him, "I haven't left yet. But, like, what if I'm—"

Her palms are pressed into the railing, her shoulders tight. Her face reveals nothing, but if she were anybody else, Charming would say she was about to cry.

"What if I'm making a mistake?" she says.

"Sabrina."

She stares out at the woods. He does not know what prompted this, but he does know that the nature of being is suffocating, constant, has no table manners. So he understands.

"Sabrina, I thought you were miserable here."

"I am," she says, collapsing limp onto the balustrade with such suddenness that Charming's hands are on their way to her shoulders until he has the sense to pull them back. "But I've been miserable lots of times. If I ran away from a problem every time I was miserable, you'd all be dead."

Her hair is the deep gold of the wheat fields of his childhood. It was long when she was young. Now it is longer, and whips about her face as it chases smoke into the wind.

"It's not about us, Grimm."

"It always is—"

"It doesn't need to be."

She doesn't respond. Charming studies her for a minute before letting his hand settle gently on her head.

"Nobody here wants you to go," he says. "But this life—if you need to leave—I get it."

"And you?" she mutters. "You didn't leave."

He hesitates. His hand pauses, tangled, halfway down her golden rush of hair. "Not that there was nothing to run from," he says, "It's just—my problems weren't born in this town. There was nowhere to run to."

Sabrina looks up at him, her eyes a sinking kind of blue, too light in tone for all their depth. She is young but her desperation is sharp, and it throws her into stunning relief, makes her a shocking chiaroscuro in the warm light of the sunset.

She turns around, elbows pressed against the balustrade, forcing his hand from her head, though it stays hovering at her side. "I don't know what I'm running to."

There was a fire in her eyes when he first met her, but she has been marching for a long time now. She stares past the railing, not at the trees but somewhere beyond that, just out of his reach.

"Grimm."

"I saved the world once?" she says, like it's a question.

"More than once," he reminds her, earnestly.

"I don't—" Her shoulders tense, fingers curling, uncurling. "I _can't—_remember that feeling anymore."

Her hand returns to her, this time to the small of her back, pressing gently. "You remember you felt it."

"Is that enough?"

It's his turn to laugh, bittersweetly. "Is anything, for you?"

"I just wish—" But she cuts herself off, pauses, says, "I don't know what I wish. I don't know where it all went to shit_._"

He studies her carefully, eyes flitting from her face in profile to the cigarette she is now crushing in her fist. "It's not really that bad, is it, Grimm?"

"These feelings," she says, turning around while Charming's hand moves to rest on her shoulder, "I don't know if they're normal stupid teenage feelings or all my trauma catching up to me. And it's—no matter which it is, the fact that I even have to _ask?_ It sucks, Billy, it—" She huffs, but it ends in a shaky sigh, her eyes squeezing shut. "Yeah. I'm tired."

"I know," is all he can say, brushing her hair from her face, tucking it behind her ear. She leans into his touch, cheek pressed against his hand.

"I'm so lost," she murmurs. Her breath is warm against his palm.

_You're nineteen, _he wants to say, because who isn't lost at nineteen? But he lost himself at that age too, in the dark eyes of a girl he barely knew, and the jury is still out on whether he has recovered.

Besides—at her core, Sabrina has always known the whole truth of herself. If her family is no longer enough to keep her here, then something is shifting, something seismic, something unstoppable.

His other hand moves up to cup her face, resting there with a tenderness he had almost forgotten he had. His thumb meets the tear that has found itself stuck in the bottom lashes of her left eye.

"The world still turns, Sabrina, and not because of you." She closes her eyes, brings her hands up to meet his, and he whispers, "Not in spite of you, either."

Another tear forms parallel to the first. This time, he lets it fall.

"It just does," he says softly.

"What if I like it?" she asks, turning and pressing her lips to his hand so that the words are muffled against his skin. "The city, the school."

"That's good, isn't it?"

She lowers their hands and looks up at him desperately. "What if I don't?"

He draws her into a hug—her arms around his waist, his around her shoulders—presses his lips to the top of her head. "Then you come back to me," he says, and amends: "To us."

"Or I stay there. In the normal." She grimaces. "Can I go back to normal? Even if I want to?"

He shrugs loosely, her arms lifting with the motion. "Grimm, you're strong enough to do whatever you want."

She scoffs.

"I'm serious."

She meets his eyes. "That's the problem."

"I'm going to miss you."

She just looks at him, her expression so close to grief. It isn't fair, he thinks, that she will grow into herself in the coming years without him.

Her fingers touch upon his cheek. And she laughs a little, the sound as fake as it is pretty. "You're ridiculous. I can't possibly—"

She stops herself. Her smile fades as he presses, "Can't possibly what?"

She pulls away, crossing her arms as she turns back to the woods. "I can't mean that much to you."

He so desperately wishes she would keep her eyes on him. She'd believe him, then. She'd have to.

"Grimm."

"Charming," she matches, gaze still on the woods, so foreign and familiar all at once.

"Sabrina."

"You barely know me."

"Is that what you think?"

"Well—I barely know _you_."

"You know me better than anyone."

She snorts.

"Almost anyone," he murmurs.

"In the grand scheme of your life, I'm nothing, Billy, don't pretend—"

"Do you really think that matters?" he asks. "The grand scheme of my life?"

She stares at him, uncomprehending.

"You know me _now_," he explains. "I'm not a prince to you. I'm not just—an Everafter in need of maintaining. I'm not a war hero or the ex-mayor or some paragon of virtue, or vice, or—do you get what I'm saying? It doesn't matter that you don't know who I was. You know who I am_. _You're one of the only people that does."

"Charming…"

"I'm not who I used to be," he says. "And neither are you. So it's okay to leave. It's okay to want to."

Sabrina looks at him at last, fully, completely, an ember glowing in the ocean of her eyes.

"I'm scared," she says, and his heart aches so much he can feel it in his throat, taste the weight of it on his tongue_. _"That I won't be happy. There, or here, or anywhere."

He wants to promise her that one day she will be, forever. But he could never lie to her.

"Me too," he says instead.

"I'll miss you, Billy."

The wind has stilled and her hair is a waterfall of gold. He can't picture this town without her, but she'll leave, and he won't have to.

She holds out her hand. He takes it and squeezes gently and she smiles, real and pained and hopeful.

He sees himself in her and hopes that one day she will get to come home, even if home isn't Ferryport Landing and this is the last time he will see her standing on his balcony. She has spent so much of her young life mourning. She deserves to be somewhere safe, somewhere easy to breathe.

"Visit soon," he says. "I'm selfish."

"You know," she says, "I used to think that."

She embraces him tightly, solidly, her frame so small and still so strong against his own. He wishes she could stay there for a while.


End file.
